June 02, 2010 | Posted by Beau Lebens

Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:

As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!

People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:

We’ve improved our support for translations, and are now looking for your help to get the Gravatar website translated into as many languages as possible

foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)

You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!

That old profile editor of ours was way too ugly and hard to use, so we’ve made it easier to use and to see what’s going on (and to add more options, such as…)

Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass as the background:

As always, if you don’t want any of your information to be public, then please just log into your account and go to “Edit My Profile” to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!

Developers; get your developer hats on because there are some especially cool things coming for you soon ;)

“The default value of anything to do with privacy should be “private” until the user decides otherwise.”

We agree, however Gravatar has always been about open identity, used all over the web (specifically *not* just a private place to share information, as Facebook used to be). Nothing in Gravatar has ever been closed and users have never had an option to explicitly make something private. We’re not suddenly exposing a lot of personal details that used to be private; the only reason to enter information in Gravatar is if you want it to be open. If you’re not comfortable with that then definitely do not enter it in your Gravatar account.

The links displayed here in the comments section are entered when you post a comment (in the URL field), they aren’t loaded from your global profile (yet!). What link are you trying to add to your profile? Are you getting an error?

Thanks, but no thanks. I wasn’t really looking for yet another public profile to have to manage, but alas you’ve forced me into it. Back when Gravatar was just ‘dumb pipes’ for my avatar I had a great appreciation for your service, now, not that impressed.

Feel free to just not enter any information in your public profile Jonathan, it’s definitely not required in any way to maintain your Gravatar. If you remove any details from there, we’ll just get a blank page on your profile.

[…] Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you've had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let's open things up. It's been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it's time to do what we've been really excited to do since we first announced profiles: As of right now, … Read More […]

Love the WordPress integration. One problem. I purchased a domain name from WordPress but my Gravatar profile is stuck on the “wordpress.com” URL for my Verified site. There’s no way to add new WordPress blogs (if you’re integrated why isn’t it on the list?)

We’re currently only supporting one of each service (WordPress included), so you’d need to remove your other one and then add your new URL to do that. We’re looking at possibly offering more than one for each service in the future.

[…] Gravatar profiles are now live. The fun thing about these are that they look handy, every linked service is verified, they’re as easy to link as Gravatars (hash of email), and they’re as open as Gravatar, meaning that with the email hash you can get all information someone has made public, in any format you like. ¶ « Dan Ariely […]

Great stuff, I think they make an option to add links to the comments you made from other blogs out there. Although that would be a big task. You’d have to grab WP blog comments RSS feeds that use Gravatar and then search out that user. I know I’ve seen a site do something similar for all the top sites out there but based it on the person’s URL they put in comments.

The main image is the Gravatar assigned to your primary address: it looks like yours is not rated “G”, so it’s not showing up. You can change that by hovering over the image on your Manage My Gravatars page and then clicking the Rating link.

This is superb stuff; I’m quite pleased! Well, except for one teeeensy thing. It’d be swell to have more than one WordPress verified account. I have both a personal and a professional WordPress blog, and I’d love to hook them both up.

Gravatar might be good to be used for english websites, but it sucks in connection-speed on international websites. Also you guys did not even manage to translate this service into other languages than english.

Is it possible to pull in the profile information from someone’s Gravatar page into an Author Profile page in WordPress? I know how to display the bio information from one’s profile within WordPress on an author page, but since the photo comes in from Gravatar, it makes sense to pull in the profile information stored on Gravatar as well. I’m just not sure how to do that.

[…] Profiles Just wondering how many of you have taken advantage of the new Gravatar profiles? http://blog.gravatar.com/2010/06/02/…-for-everyone/ I just recently went in and configured mine for WPTavern. Check it out and look how big the beer […]

There is not currently a way to do this (lookups are by email only, and there’s no “assisted” way of doing that either). There are no immediate plans to do this, but we might at some point in the future.

[…] Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you've had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let's open things up. It's been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it's time to do what we've been really excited to do since we first announced profiles: As of right now, … Read More […]

[…] You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself. (Official Gravatar Blog) […]

[…] Gravatar rolled out for June 2010 Public Profiles, so there is a lot of development to come with the system. Also, a lot of websites have Gravatar enabled. If your site is not, but you would like to put it in your comment system, you can. Regardless of what system you use, there is a great Developer’s Resource section at Gravatar, including directions for Using Gravatar in WordPress. […]

Awesome thing. But this is still missing some important (at last for me) features like adding multiple verified services, moving personal links from main window to sidebar, adding custom and multiple contact info, something like displaying rss feeds from multiple sources (like blog, photoblog, microblog, flickr and others). Everything with fluid and configurable widget-based layout.
Gravatar should become something like a internet id that gathers links to all places one is active on and his recent activity. But not in friendfeed way. Good example of what I’m writing about is storytlr. You can see how it’s working on Fred Gallagher contrails page (http://contrails.fredart.com/).

We ask for this because at some point we’d love to be able to update your profile/picture in other places (with your permission of course), and didn’t want to have to make people go through the authorization process again.

Is there a way to search for others gravatar profile via their email address or any means for that matter. I would love to have the option (maybe a WP plugin idea?) that allowed me to put a guest author’s gravatar image and maybe even their little self bio at the end of their post. Especially if this is a one time guest post, no need to create an account on WP for that.

You are just verifying that these external profiles are indeed yours so that they can be listed on your profile page. This is intended to make sure that people don’t list fake details on their account, that is all.